Butter makes it better

Here, at last, is my all-request post, in which you, the readers, made suggestions for what I should write about and I, the writer, wrote about them. Let’s see what happened.

Of course, I knew that the history of butter would be interesting, but I didn’t realize just how interesting. Who knows precisely when the first butter was invented, but apparently the first reference to butter was on a limestone tablet around 4,500 years ago, and it’s very likely that someone riding through the desert with a pouch of milk found that by the end of the day the milk had become something no longer entirely milk, and thus butter was born.

I’m not sure why I like this next sentence so much, but it definitely has appeal: “Through much of the Middle Ages, butter was a common food across most of Europe, but one with a low reputation.”

Hundreds of years later, we find ourselves not far from this very region, when, in 1848, the first butter factory was established near Goshen, New York, of all places! Local farmers would bring their milk to the factory to get converted into butter, which had by then improved its reputation.
And by 1932, the 65-year-old Laura Ingalls Wilder was able to recount her own childhood experience with butter: “In winter the cream was not yellow as it was in summer, and butter churned from it was white and not so pretty. Ma liked everything on her table to be pretty, so in the wintertime she colored the butter.” Note: this says precisely everything you need to know about Caroline Ingalls, as far as I’m concerned.

But how, as a reader asked, would I fare if I had to do all the stuff the Ingalls family did? This is a question I have actually put to myself many a time, and the first thing I can say is that I probably wouldn’t care so much about coloring the butter as I would care simply about the mind-numbing exhaustion involved in such tasks as all-day butter churning and washing clothes on a wooden board. And of course the winter days that, if they were lucky, got up to a nice toasty ten degrees below zero.

I should probably admit that I was cruelly thrilled by the book The Long Winter (set in the remarkably long winter of 1880-1881) when I read and reread it to my girls some years ago. By the end of the book, when the family has lived through six months of endless blizzards, in forty degrees below zero temperatures, eating only coarse brown bread made of rough flour that they had to grind in their coffee grinder all day long, well, you realize that things in your life aren’t really all that bad.

Meanwhile, during that exact same winter of 1880, way across the country, an enormous, gorgeous apartment building was being constructed in New York City. Called the Dakota, after the Dakota Territory that, completely coincidentally, Laura Ingalls and her family happened to be living in at the time, the building, just across from Central Park on 72nd Street, opened as the first luxury apartment building in Manhattan in 1884.

You might have heard that the building was called the Dakota because at the time that area of upper Manhattan was as sparsely settled as the Dakota Territory, but other accounts claim that Edward C. Clark, who funded its construction, simply liked the names of western territories.
The Dakota is, of course, famous for being the site of John Lennon’s death and also the setting of Rosemary’s Baby, but for me, the Dakota will always be the building that secretly terrified me as a child because of the somewhat ferocious-looking heads on the fence that surrounds it.

My father lived just two blocks away from the Dakota and we always passed it on our way to the park. In order to calm myself, I would pinch the noses of all the scary-looking faces on the fence as we passed them. This seemed to do the trick, and I have to admit that the urge to do so still comes over me to this day.

And what about Goya? One hundred and thirty-four years before any of the events of that long winter of 1880 took place, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was born in Aragon, Spain. Who was Goya? Was he the baddest painter since Jan Vermeer? Perhaps.

It is difficult for me to write about art and artists, but I can tell you that I happen to like Goya’s more freaky paintings and that there is a print called “So Was His Grandfather” that I like everything about, including the description: “Goya satirizes the nobility’s obsession with genealogy by depicting a donkey looking at a family tree of donkeys.”

Finally, Screamo, which is apparently a thing that the kids are listening to these days, even though it is not the thing it was when it first came about in the early 1990s, when it was something like emo mixed with hardcore. Just now I looked at a list of contemporary Screamo bands and did not know a single one. This did not bother me in the slightest.